About Hak Foo

Hak Foo’s Comments

What happens if the legislature just says "Okay, F*** Berne. We're withdrawing from the whole bloody treaty"?

If you're Guyana, you're not exactly a major IP exporter, so there's little, if any, obvious downside.

It's a cute game of brinkmanship too-- the rich powers can gnash their teeth and storm, but can't do anything... it would not exactly be marketable to say "We're sanctioning/invading this poor country to force them to buy expensive books."

"Innovation" when it comes to DRM is a rather academic use of the word. Yes, you're advancing the state of the science, but it's a science that most consumers fundamentally don't want. It's like trying to get the Nobel in Medicine for advancing the spread of genital warts.

As a consumer, copy-prevention technologies rarely present clear and direct value to me. One of the few prominent exceptions is Steam, which actually offers a legitimate and comprehensible convenience. In contrast, every flyer and explanation I ever saw about UltraViolet just made me more confused and more wondering "why exactly can't I just rip this on my PC like an audio disc?"

Sure, the industry shills will say "without crippling DRM, we couldn't sell $foo...". Bullshit. It's not that you can't sell it, it's that you won't because you think you can grab more out of the customer. Notice how media companies had to handle China-- without being able to effectively swing the club of the law around, they actually had to re-price their products to the market.

This sort of innovative diplomacy gives me hope for the future of the US.

Hold on. I've just been informed that we're taking part in the Kittens for Orphans Treaty of 2012 negotiations, and to on-board the process, we have to declare ourselves the 16th through 55th provinces of Slovenia from now on.

Your argument begins on the belief that the creator gets the entire universe of possible uses for himself, and if we set aside anything (i. e. private use, fair use) it's a cost to them, worthy of some recompense.

The more correct model is that anything we offer the creators is a gift at everyone else's expense, so there's no obligation to make up for some revenue stream they're being denied.

Your justification is like saying "I didn't get you that Maybach for your birthday, Sally Super Sweet Sixteen, but here's a Porsche, and I'll buy you something else to make up for the letdown."

Is the (money/hassle) I spend on content provided by others greater than the financial or control benefits I get from being able to license my own output?

For most people, the licensing value of their output is within a rounding error of zero. This is not an insult, but rather a market perspective. Unless you're famous, the letters you wrote to Aunt Matilda are not going to be widely published. The anime fanart you slapped on DeviantArt? 50 cents, tops.

The "oh, someone could use your family or cat photo without paying you" is largely a strawman. If you beefed, there are probably a thousand other people with similar photos out there thrilled to be able to say "My dog was the Liver Smacks dog from 2012 to 2014!" It's like when politicians use music where the composer hates their platform-- even if you can legally get away with it by paying the appropriate license fees, the poor press is not worth it.

I always saw this as an obsiouc Google step-in situation. "Use our new platform for free or nominally cheap, and incidentally, since we host the data, we can provide halfway-decent search services on top of it".

House search is dreck. And the entire MLS structure doesn't help (arbitrary borders between territories mean you won't necessarily find every house without going between several listing sites). The integration facilities provided are either expensive and huge hassles (store the entire MLS and sort it out on your system) or limited (iframe in this box and have little to no SEO or presentational control). There also tend to be obnoxious or downright crippling usage rules (must show all listings, must include irrelevant disclaimers, cannot allow this or that, etc.)

I'm only interested if they do the public forum in the form of pro wrestling, not political debate. I think we ALL want to see Chris Dodd, in some ridiculous character outfit (may I suggest "The Human Great Firewall?") talking in the third person, and finally getting that well-deserved break-away folding chair to the back.

And much like pro wrestling, it will end up being an amusing show of little real consequence.

One of the major components of a religion is a moral code, perhaps even more so than the creation myth or promise of salvation.

In this context, Kopimism makes perfect sense. It's simply defining a moral code which weights "sharing information" as more valuable than "preserving a state-sanctioned economic hack". It might even be seen as a "light" religion which outsources the other normal religious expectations (like the aforementioned creation myth) to other cultural traditions.

"Big Piracy". All I can imagine from that is Eiichiro Oda's morbidy obese portrayal of Blackbeard. I guess maybe he follows RIAA logic and belives that P2P software firms hold six times the total capital on earth.

"Big Search". Yeah. I'm a Google fan. They've created billions of dollars of real stockholder value in recent years and gone from "Cool tech demo" to "hub of modern life".

"Big Hardware". What's to like there? Oh, yeah! I remember! The fact that now you get five thousand times more disc space or processing power for the same money as years ago.

Given the choice between standing up for these industries, and "Big Content", which seems to have all the business acumen of a taco salad, I will indeed apologize for them. Hey, content industry-- if you want apologists, maybe look at the concept of "new products which offer better value for the customer than the ones they replace."